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Past Exhibitions

The Everyday Fantastic

June 09, 2017, through August 27, 2017

Location: Hood Downtown, 53 Main Street, Hanover, NH

Julie Blackmon: The Everyday Fantastic features work from this major American photographer's most recent, and ongoing, series, titled Homegrown. Blackmon was raised in Springfield, Missouri, and has decided to remain there and make that world the setting for her work. She approaches Middle America with a poetic combination of wonder and worry as she explores the perpetual mysteries of daily life in a particular place.

In Homegrown, her third series, Blackmon evokes a domestic world gone just slightly awry. There is nothing disastrous in her mise-en-scenes--yet. But each image suggests potential intrigues that percolate just below the level of the obvious. The artist's brilliance lies in allowing viewers the sense that they are making their own discoveries rather than entering into a world that has been carefully constructed by the artist.

Of course, Blackmon works diligently to ensnare us in just such a conundrum. Her richly detailed photographs depend on careful staging and the acceptance of serendipity. Her works exist somewhat outside of time--or, at least, they... read more

World Processor

March 24, 2017, through May 28, 2017

Location: Hood Downtown, 53 Main Street, Hanover, NH

Art encompasses all things, so it is not surprising that artists have embraced big data as both a tool and a subject of their work. Ingo Günther, who studied ethnology and cultural anthropology at Frankfurt University and sculpture and media at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, has been mapping data onto a sea of illuminated globes in his World Processor series for fifteen years. The series is now internationally renowned and numbers over one thousand objects, a selection of which will be available to Hood Downtown visitors for the first time. The artist’s envisioning of complex data on physically identical but content-specific illuminated globes foregrounds scientific, economic, and historical information to create multilayered accounts of the relationship between humans and the planet.

This exhibition is paired with Mining Big Data: Luis Delgado-Qualtrough and Amy Balkin in the Strauss Gallery, Hopkins Center, from March 24 through April 30. Both exhibitions reveal how artists use information to create new forms and ways of understanding global issues.... read more

Amy Balkin and Luis Delgado-Qualtrough

March 24, 2017, through April 30, 2017

Location: Strauss Gallery, Hopkins Center

Art encompasses all things, so it is not surprising that artists have embraced big data as both a tool and subject of their work. In very different ways, Amy Balkin and Luis Delgado-Qualtrough use data-driven research to grapple visually with such topics as climate change, the demands on global natural resources, carbon emissions, solar energy, and the effects of various human activities on a global scale. Amy Balkin’s poster titled The Atmosphere: A Guide explores the influence of history and politics on the Earth’s atmosphere. Luis Delgado-Qualtrough tackles the problem of carbon accumulation with 10 Carbon Conundrums, a word-and-image essay that recombines historical events, dates, and GPS coordinates. This exhibition is paired with Ingo Günther: World Processor on view at Hood Downtown from March 24 through May 28. Both exhibitions reveal how artists use information to create new forms and ways of understanding global issues.

Let the Garden Eram Flourish

January 5, 2017, through March 12, 2017

Location: Hood Downtown, 53 Main Street, Hanover, NH

This exhibition presents a suite of paintings, installations, and video from Iranian-born, Brooklyn-based Bahar Behbahani’s acclaimed Persian Gardens, an ongoing series that she began four years ago. An engineering tour de force, Persian or Iranian gardens have captured human imagination since their emergence in the sixth century BCE. These walled gardens comprise multilateral structures, connecting aqueducts, networks of water channels, and surrounding trees and vegetation that remain lush all year in the middle of the desert. Behbahani explores the intersection of politics and poetics that defines the gardens as contested spaces—objects of beauty that have attracted people from different walks of life throughout the ages, from the Persian rulers who created them to evoke their transcendence and political power to the diplomats, common folk, scholars, and soldiers who have sought out their orientalist enchantment.

Haunted by the spirits of fierce power play, the gardens are marked by tragedy, love, betrayal, death, and redemption, and are thus a metaphor for Iran’s fraught histories, past and present... read more

Accent Elimination

January 17, 2017, through March 05, 2017

Location: Strauss Gallery, Hopkins Center

Our language and accent are fundamental elements of how we express and identify who we are, where we come from, and how we relate to one another. Yet, how often do we think about trying to alter our tone, our voice, or our words? Can you think of a time when you might have benefitted from adjusting your accent?

As an artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York, Nina Katchadourian would come across signs advertising “accent elimination” as she walked the city streets. Inspired by the seemingly paradoxical notion of improving one’s accent as a means of assimilation while still attempting to sustain one’s cultural identity, Katchadourian created the multimedia work, aptly titled Accent Elimination.

In it, Katchadourian explores language and identity and questions what an accent is at its core. As she explains:

My foreign-born parents who have lived in the United States for over forty years both have distinctive but hard-to-place accents that I have never been able to imitate correctly (and have not inherited... read more

The Fractal Architectures

September 16, 2016, through December 11, 2016

Location: Hood Downtown, 53 Main Street, Hanover, NH

The inaugural exhibition at the Hood Downtown Exhibition Space will feature the work of contemporary French photographer Laetitia Soulier. She bases her images and sculptures on the idea of fractal geometry, where each area has a direct scale relationship to the other—understanding a fraction of the world she creates implies comprehension of the whole. Of course, she enjoys simultaneously breaking these rules in her images with the addition of people, whose presence defies the otherwise logical scale relations. In this way, her work mixes logic and magic seamlessly, in a manner consistent with a certain stage in childhood development.

To achieve her effects, she builds carefully handcrafted models that are stages for the single lens of a camera. For each photograph she creates an entire universe. For each series of photographs—“The Matryoshka Dolls” and “The Square Roots”— the visual themes are constant, and many of the furniture pieces are reused, but the set is remade for each individual image. Despite laboring over the models for months, she still applies post-production to her work as well, to merge the... read more

The Craft of Art

In collaboration with the Studio Art Department and Dartmouth’s Artist-in-Residence Program, the Hood Museum of Art presents recent works by visiting Belgian artist Eric van Hove. Born in Guelma, Algeria, van Hove was raised in Yaoundé, Cameroon. In 2011, he moved to Marrakesh, Morocco, where he created his breakout V12 Laraki, an exact replica of the Mercedes-Benz engine of the same name, recently acquired by the museum. Produced in collaboration with about fifty-five local craftsmen, the sculpture showcases van Hove’s ingenuity and the brilliance of Maghreb craftsmanship. In addition to the majestic V12 Laraki, the exhibition includes an exploded V12 engine gearbox, and five smaller parts, all meticulously handcrafted using different techniques and with materials sourced from around Morocco.

Photographs by James Nachtwey and Kevin Bubriski

January 23, 2016, through March 13, 2016

In the spring of 2015, just days after a magnitude 7.8 earthquake shook Gorkha District and surrounding areas in Nepal, photojournalist James Nachtwey ’70 documented the immediate aftermath among these devastated communities, both in urban centers and in mountain villages only accessible by helicopter. Six weeks later, photographer Kevin Bubriski arrived in Kathmandu and captured the rebuilding of a city and the resilience of its people. A few of those images by each photographer are on view in this exhibition.

New Works and Conversations around African Art

January 16, 2016, through March 13, 2016

Successive African art curators at the Hood Museum of Art have assembled an extraordinary and holistic vision of the arts of Africa that encompasses both important historical milestones and the multiple cultural and social vistas of this continent. Acquired over the past two years and on view together for the first time, these thirty-one exceptional objects map the contour of modern and contemporary African art from the 1960s to the present while also shedding critical light on the diversity of African artistic practices by multiple generations of artists. The installation includes an exciting array of paintings, photographs, sculptures, drawings, ceramic, and mixed media, including works by Ibrahim El Salahi, Lamidi Fakeye, Akin Fakeye, Owusu-Ankomah, Victor Ekpuk, Chike Obeagu, Candice Breitz, Nomusa Makhubu, Julien Sinzogan, Aida Muluneh, Halida Boughriet, Mario Macilau, Eric van Hove, Khulumeleni Magwaza, and Nidhal Chamekh.

Ice Cuts

January 09, 2016, through March 13, 2016

Vermont-based artist Eric Aho’s series of Ice Cuts paintings is inspired by the hole cut in the ice in front of a Finnish sauna, an aspect of Finnish culture that Aho’s family has maintained to this day. Intended for an icy immersion following the heat of the sauna, the avanto, as it is called in Finnish, underscores and personalizes the inherent contrasts in nature. Aho began the Ice Cuts series nine years ago, making one painting a year of the dark void produced by the act of sawing into the thick ice. This exhibition is the first to concentrate on the Ice Cuts paintings he has created to date. The central abstract form in these compositions provides the structure for experimentation with paint texture, surface, and subtly nuanced color, lending these frozen scenes both an austere beauty and a particular vibrancy. This exhibition brings together the major paintings in the series to date and smaller, related works on paper to offer unique insight into the artistic process.

The Hood Museum of Art houses one of the oldest and largest college collections in the country, with more than 65,000 objects from the Americas, Europe, Africa, Papua New Guinea, Australia, and many more regions of the world.